After the attacks on US at Sep. 11, 2001, national security is becoming the most important issue for almost every country in the world. One key issue of national security is to ensure the safety and reliability of airports, harbors, important science-technology parks, and so, on, which emphasizes, in particular, the vehicle/personnel tracking and identification. Currently, those procedures relating to safety and security control, including entrance registration, issuance of temporary identification card, or identification inspection, etc., are performed manually by security guards or service counter personnel. Although there are already some security mechanism capable of issuing identification cards automatically, the identification cards issued thereby only contain simple information including serial number, time log that are suitable for mechanical handling. With the development in radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in recent years, there are more and more security systems adopting RFID card in vehicle/personnel tracking and identification for the purpose of cutting down the manpower requirement in safety control. However, since most RFID security systems currently available are passive RFID systems with passive RFID tags that are only powered for access while in close proximity to a reader, they are only applicable in access control and spot management. That is, since such passive RFID security systems is not able to track an object effectively in real time and also can not access information in a precise and clear manner, they will not be able to response to an emergency situation quickly and efficiently.
In order to achieve precision control, real-time tracking and quick emergency response, it is required for the security systems to adopt some long-distance active RFID cards. However, such active RFID cards are usually bigger, thicker and heavier than passive cards so that they can not be issued by common card dispensers without constant malfunction and breakdown.
There are already automatic card dispensers being developed not only for security control usage but also for consumer demand that are designed for handling larger and heavier cards, such as DVD cards, parking cards with tracking control, admission cards for financial institutions, and so on.
One of which is a dispensing unit for smart card dispenser, disclosed in TW Pat. No. M334971. The aforesaid dispensing unit, being a gravity-type device that is inclinedly arranged inside a smart card dispenser, is capable of causing the friction to a sliding smart card to increase as it is being dispensed and thus reducing its sliding speed as well as it momentum for enabling the smart card to be ejected out of the card dispenser smoothly. Moreover, as the card dispensing slot of the aforesaid dispensing unit is designed as a bar-like hole, any card being dispensed is supposed to fall into the bar-like hole that is visible and eye-catching to an user for preventing the dispensed card from being forgotten and left in the card dispensing slot. In addition, as the width of the bar-like hole is smaller than the dispensed smart card, the smart card is prevented from falling out of the card dispensing slot directly.
Another such dispenser is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,168,151, entitled “Card type dispenser assembly with bottom loading”, in which a card-like article is provided with an elevator assembly that can elevate a stacked array of cards to a discharge station.
Therefore, it is in need of an automatic card dispenser capable of issuing any modern cards efficiently without malfunction.